Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence technology has allowed him to complete a “final Beatles song” that will be out later this year. He made the announcement in an interview on BBC 4 this morning and while he didn’t go into detail about the song itself, most theorize it’s “Now and Then,” one of a few demos John Lennon recorded and put on a cassette titled “For Paul” shortly before his death in 1980.
That cassette also included the songs that would become be completed by McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as “Real Love” and “Free As a Bird” on the 1995 Beatles Anthology compilations. “Now and Then” was worked on at the time but considered too rough to finish. Jeff Lynne, who worked on those sessions, said there was a chorus but no verse, and the demo had a persistent buzz running through it. “That one’s still lingering around,” McCartney said in a 2012 BBC Four documentary on Jeff Lynne. “So I’m going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
Finish something they have, using AI to get rid of the “ropey” sound and isolate the instruments — technology employed in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary — from Lennon’s voice. “We had John’s voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI,” McCartney told the BBC. “They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar’. So when we came to to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
McCartney says he’s not so sure about all uses of AI, though. “I’m not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs’, and it’s just AI, you know? It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIZrdXm9UTQ